The present invention relates to disk drives having flying type heads such as magnetic disk drives, optical disk drives and magnetic optical disk drives and, in particular to a magnetic disk drive including a load beam which holds a head slider at its one end, which is formed integrally with a wiring pattern, and which has a wiring extension of the wiring pattern.
With advance of the transfer rate due to the increasing recording density, the shape of the so-called head gimbal assembly wherein a load beam bearing a head slider is assembled with signal-conveying wires has shifted to the long tail type from the conventional short tail type. The short tail type has a short wiring extension whereas the long tail type has both a wiring pattern and a long wiring extension integrated thereto. In addition, due to the raised operating rotation speed, it has become an important technical theme to reduce fluid vibrations caused by high speed air flows passing the wiring extension in order to raise the positioning accuracy for higher density recording.
In conjunction with this technical field, a structure employing a wiring pattern-integrated load beam is disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 9-161251. In this structure, a convex or step portion is formed along a side face of the guide arm so as to provide a plane parallel to the load beam-mounting plane. In addition, the extension wiring pattern is bonded onto the parallel plane provided by the convex or step portion.